AV-Comparatives' December 2009 report has been released and there are eight …

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Following its November 2009 retrospective/proactive report, AV-Comparatives has released its December 2009 Potentially Unwanted Applications (PUA) comparative. PUA refers to adware, spyware, rogue, and other fraudulent software circulating on the Internet that are not typical malware (classification in the last category is sometimes not an easy task; under some circumstances, PUAs are accepted in some countries, depending on the cultural background or the legal system, and hence the term "potentially unwanted"). AV-Comparatives typically do not include PUAs in their malware test sets, but since users may want to know how well their antivirus program detects potentially unwanted software, a separate test was created.

The first PUA test contained 750,297 individual samples (only program executables) that cover mainly adware, spyware, and rogue software gathered between January 2009 and October 2009 (sets were frozen on the October 29, 2009). Dialers, potentially dangerous tools, and other greyware were not included, as their classification is debatable. Not all security products include detection for them as this sometimes breaks company policy. Sixteen products were updated on November 6, 2009, set on the highest detection settings (except for Sophos and F-Secure, per their own request), and put to the test.

The bulleted list represents the detection rates in percentage points for adware, spyware, and rogues, while the chart shows the number of missed samples in percentage points. After taking these results into consideration, AV-Comparatives rated the security companies from best to worst in three categories:

The results seem to suggest that the best antivirus applications that regularly rank highly in general malware tests are not necessarily as good at anti-adware, antispyware, and antirogue detection. That said, all 16 products detected at least 85 percent of the threats, which is respectable. Overall, we can say that the detection rate of PUAs is similar to the detection rate of general malware.

It's worth noting that this is the first AV-Comparatives test in which Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE), Redmond's free antimalware solution, was tested in its final 1.0 form. MSE was released in September 2009 and these tests were performed last month. Clearly Microsoft has work to do, at least in the PUA department (the beta version did quite well in older antimalware tests).